Ask HN: Website Obesity Crisis | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Website Obesity Crisis

2 pointstmaly6 comments

I have read a few articles over the past week about sites using too many large frameworks and files etc. Simple content is delivered as a 1MB+ page.

What smaller framework would you use for a responsive site in 2016?

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Take a look at Pocket Grid. It's not a framework, but a tiny responsive CSS grid system. Given that many websites are relatively simple in layout and presentation, it may be all you need. It's a shame this grid system hasn't gained more traction (it's from 2013)

http://arnaudleray.github.io/pocketgrid/

And now for a bit of a rant...

For many websites, you don't need a framework. My (completely anecdotal) impression is that few web developers trim the fat from the frameworks they use. That is to say: the websites they create have many unused CSS rules and unnecessary scripts. This amounts to substantial extra KB being downloaded by website visitors even when it's not needed.

Additionally, many sites are over-engineered with excessive Javascript to render simple web pages (even when the site is not a web app).

I did look pocketgrid last year. I could not get it to behave like something like bootstrap. It would be nice if there was a simple grid that just sort of worked on all the modern mobile and desktop browsers. I am ok with not supporting IE or other browsers that have a tiny market share

riotjs + (purecss|getskeleton) here.

I have tried both of those in the past. I really like purecss but I felt that their example templates included more than just purecss framework. I did not have much luck with getskeleton.

http://mincss.com/ was another I liked but the grid did not work as well as I wanted.

I feel like it depends what you're looking for.

Do you strictly want grid system ONLY, or do you want "everything" (like bootstrap)? What do you mean by included more than it? The examples look fine - pure is split up into a lot of files[0]

[0] http://purecss.io/customize/

take a look at http://purecss.io/layouts/marketing/

and all the files it pulls like yui-min.js look at the 2.2K of css just for the page.

At first glance pure sounds good given the file size it touts, but when you need to use it, it seems like you have to include a whole lot more.

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